Unkiss Me
Authors: Suzy Vitello
unkiss me
seven stories of love
by suzy vitello
To all who have suffered in the nam
e of love. Congratulations, you are not alone.
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Published by Suzy Vitello
Amazon Kindle Edition
Copyright 2013, Suzy Vitello
The
following stories in this book were originally published in various journals in slightly different form:
Mississippi Review
“unkiss me…” (as “paper husbands” fall, 2005)
eye~rhyme
“the remains of a system” (spring, 2005)
Red China Magazine
“putting asunder” (spring, 2004)
Tarpaulin Sky
“26 poses” (fall, 2003)
Amarillo Bay
“the graceful plumber” (summer, 2003)
Prose Ax
“spiraling along one day at a time” (summer, 2003)
Willamette Week
“the graceful plumber” (winter, 1992)
~
table of contents
unkiss me and return me to the dwarfs
the superfund center of health & healing
spiraling along, one day at a time
~
Bikram Yoga is comprised of twenty-six asanas, and must be practiced in an area heated to at least 100° F.
Heat and sweat are key. Also crucial is a full-length mirror. One cannot practice Yoga correctly without the body reflected back. As with love, you get out of yoga what you put into it.
1.
Standing Deep Breathing
You open the door on a deep blue-sky day, and on your porch stands the carpenter.
He has ridden his bicycle and stashed it at odd angles in the ivy. He wears flip-flops—two different flip-flops, in fact. Those eyes, a half-shade lighter than the sky. A soft beard, velvet as young leaves. He is more breathtaking than you remember. You’ve been expecting him. He’s here to bid on cabinet installation and some pegboard you want in the garage because there’s nowhere for your screwdrivers. Be cool, you think. This is hormones, you think. “Hi,” you say. He steps lightly into your foyer (yes, you have a foyer) and glances all around as though your house were a museum. One day you’ll find out he noticed flaws immediately. Dry wall inconsistencies, casement windows mis-hung.
What you don’t know, what you don’t even suspect, is that this is the beginning of an epic ride. Take a deep, deep breath, because shortly, your cells will restructure, your blood will change course.
Your body, as you know it, will bake at 350, and the toothpicks inserted will never come out clean.
2.
Half Moon Pose with Hands to Feet Pose
The phone is your enemy.
You’ve always known this. You were raised this way. Didn’t your father one time yank the princess phone from the wall outlet and hurl it into the toilet? The carpenter’s work is done, and though he suggested a social activity—a movie, he said—he won’t call you for another year. But you don’t know this yet. Still, if you hurl the phone into the toilet, you could call him to come fix it, right? Why are you acting like a teenager all of the sudden? After all, you have two children, and they happen to be right there at the dining room table while you pace back and forth, glaring at the phone. Your two little fatherless kids are forming Playdoh shapes on their placemats. The older one, the boy, is rolling a log back and forth on his mat. It looks like a penis. Your girl watches everything her brother does and screams because she can’t do the same. So impossible, for a two-year-old to roll Playdoh into the penis shape. You show her how to make a Patty-cake, instead. You bend down a couple times, to pick the dried bits of Playdoh off the floor.
The phone pouts from its place in the corner.
A stand-off.
3.
Awkward Pose
You run into the carpenter at a coffee shop while wearing a magenta jogging suit.
Anything, anything other than this horrifically matron-like garment, would have been a better choice. The stretch-shorts that show your bulgy thighs would have been better. Perhaps the tee shirt from Disneyland, the one with Mickey and his wizard cap, a semi-circle of stars peppering your boobs. The magenta jogging suit is leftover from your other life, the one you led before your husband was killed in a car accident and you moved out west to the state of OR-y-gun to become a liberal.The carpenter smiles, his ponytail still wet from a morning shower. He gestures for you to join him in coffee and scone. You return the smile, shake your head. Try to cover the overly wide zipper of your jogging jacket with a copy of The Oregonian. Try to find composure. Poise. One day you will find out this is one of his fondest memories of you: this day he ran into you in the coffee shop.
He doesn’t remember what you were wearing.
4.
Eagle Pose
So he calls you. You go out. He calls you. You go out. He calls you, and after three platonic dates, you give up. The carpenter will be your buddy. You begin to justify: he doesn’t read fiction; he’s not ironic or funny. He doesn’t get your jokes. The balance is off, intellectually. So what if every liquid form of matter in your body flows in his direction? When you walk downtown together, your steps don’t match: his left foot, your right foot. His landing step, your foot still in the air. You are mercurial and airy; his lack of verbosity precludes speaking until he’s sure. But still, he sees things. He has the eyes of an eagle. He notices the seismic flaws in the buildings you pass: subtle details, hairline cracks in the masonry. Once, he pointed to an airplane—a speck in the sky— and explained the difference between a propjet and a DC-10. He talked about wingspan. Lift and drag. “Bernoulli,” you said, remembering the scientist, but not the principle. He said, “Who?”
5.
Standing Head to Knee Pose
Four days before your thirtieth birthday, you invite the carpenter over for a video because you can’t get a babysitter.
You sit next to him on the couch watching “Pacific Heights.” It’s a movie about mindfucking. Because of this, you decide to play around with the carpenter’s head. Well, his hair, actually. Before you know it, you’re brushing it in patient, controlled strokes, not unlike the way you brush your little girl’s hair. The carpenter’s body language changes. He shifts his head down onto your lap. Toward the end of the movie, when the protagonist stalks the antagonist in a predictable Hollywood twist, you are upstairs, inserting your ten-year-old diaphragm into your thirty-year-old vagina. One day he’ll tell you, that night, he felt set up.
6.
Standing Bow Pulling Pose
Blood flows freely from your center.
Think of a winter stream thaw. You are that stream, all snow melt and rage. The carpenter and you: wherever, whenever. Your outline sweat-printed to walls, strands of long blond hair on your dining room table where the kids still roll out Playdoh (now in perfect, round balls that they slice with plastic knives). When has it ever been this much fun?
August and hot.
So hot. You sense the balance about to change, like an archer at maximum pullback. You are about to let go. And you do, again and again. Pull back, release. Pull back, release. When you walk in the woods, along the stream near the house you will soon sell, you watch the way water rushes down and down and curls around the rocks before spilling to its destiny. A tiny creek comes along, minding its own business, and you know the quiet water in the creek is about to join the wilder water of the stream. Confluence, it’s called when the mingling of streams occurs. Nature doesn’t know choice, and neither do you.
7.
Balancing Stick Pose
One of the carpenter’s favorite activities is walking through works-in-progress, noting the building decisions of other carpenters.
He does this after hours, and the trespassing makes you nervous. Still, there is a thrill in negotiating catwalks and scaffolding behind him as he points out future toilets and closets.
“Those couplings are twenty bucks a piece,” he announces, and you realize he is fantasizing stealing the hardware carelessly piled in a corner.
He kisses you as you balance on a riser, the zigzag beneath your feet inviting misstep.
Not long after this evening, you’ll crawl behind the carpenter as he scales an ocean cliff. Climbing this precipice, the Pacific roaring and threatening behind you, you’ll feel powerful, manly, even. Inching back down, however, will terrify you. Think of a cat stuck on the upper branches of an oak. Notions of hook and ladder trucks will flood your brain, but there will only be this carpenter, his gentle voice and your trust.
You are discovering that dating this carpenter is like standing on one leg at a time: life with boyfriend, life with kids.
This gets sticky when the carpenter spends the night, which he does with increasing frequency. One morning, you’re making pancakes, and discover the dining room table heaped with freshly harvested marijuana. You don’t mind this, theoretically; you know that side of his life. But this is your house. Your kids roll Playdoh on this table, and now, these hairy clumps of bud lie there. You feed the kids in the family room instead. Turn on “Beauty and the Beast.” Disney, you think, and lots of it. Sometimes, you wish you didn’t give that magenta jogging suit to Goodwill.
8.
Standing Separate Leg Stretching Pose
The carpenter likes to make money.
You could be making money, too, he says. He’ll teach you. So you sell your nice, finished house and enter the world of the fixer-upper. Two for the price of one: the carpenter’s fixer and, a few blocks away, your fixer. This is an investment, you tell yourself. Houses are leaping up in price, you tell yourself, five thousand a month, in fact. You’re making money while drinking your morning coffee. But whose blue eyes are you looking into while drinking that coffee? Why is there half-and-half in your refrigerator, when you drink your coffee black?
Your hundred-year old house needs lots of work.
TLC, is how it was advertised. Never in your life have you repaired anything. You come from a tradition of throwing stuff out and buying a new one. Well, once, as a child, you found an old wagon in an alley and covered it with contact paper and white paint. This wagon, when you looked at it, made the space between your heart and stomach glow as if warmed by briquettes. You want that glow again, so, after watching the carpenter and taking notes in a spiral notebook, you buy a heat gun and start stripping the Victorian molding around your windows. You buy pry bars and hammers and a Makita cordless drill. You even swap out a three-prong pigtail on your dryer because you have a four-prong outlet. And when you’re done, the dryer works!
Meanwhile, in his fixer, the carpenter has discovered the work-enhancing effects of methamphetamine.
9.
Triangle Pose
The ten-year old diaphragm fails you.
Duh, say the eyes of the Planned Parenthood doctor as he sucks the collection of cells from your all-too-inviting womb. But, it wasn’t as easy as all that, this decision. For nearly a month, you contemplated two distinct trinities, tried to come up with a workable intersection.
First, the existing trinity: You, and your fatherless son and daughter.
This trio was born of survival, and as such, the edges have blurred. You have done your part, your heart has stretched as far as it needs to stretch; you are through. Until you contemplate a second triangle. The carpenter, you, and a potential baby. A potential trinity. A virtual trinity. A trinity emerging given this variable and that variable.
You take your existing kids to a Disney matinee, an aggressive one with abrupt animation cuts.
It’s loud in the theater, and dark, thank God, so your weeping goes undetected.
10.
Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee Pose
There are valleys between the carpenter’s ribs.
Valleys! His likeness to Jesus has bumped up a notch. Christ on crank, you think, and chuckle. See? That’s the problem right there! The part of you that thinks having a speed freak for a boyfriend is funny. It’s not funny, though, when he falls asleep at the wheel while driving along the interstate. It’s your car he’s driving, and you and your precious babies are in it. You break up with the carpenter. Sort of. You give him the first in a long line of ultimatums. No more of the white shit. Period. Then you scuttle back to the shaky lathe and plaster walls of your fixer.